1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus. More particularly, the present invention relates to an image processing apparatus for detecting a desired image-element from a given image.
2. Description of the Related Art
As an image recognition apparatus that identifies an image to be recognized, an apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No.5-174149 has been conventionally known. This image recognition apparatus converts an object image, that is an object of recognition, into a coarse-mosaic image, and scans an unknown image by using this coarse-mosaic image as a feature of the object image so as to roughly find the position and size of the object image. Then, the image recognition apparatus produces a fine-mosaic image from the object image and scans an area around the position in the unknown image, that was roughly found, so as to find the object image.
In the conventional image recognition apparatus, the number of pixels of the mosaic image used as the feature of the object image is changed in three stages, so as to calculate the distance between the mosaic image and the unknown image in each stage. This image recognition apparatus detects the object image to be recognized based on the thus calculated distance.
The conventional image recognition apparatus, however, stores a plurality of templates for finding the object image to be recognized, and compares the templates with the object image one by one so as to detect the object image to be recognized. Thus, it spends much time to compare the templates with the object image by the conventional image recognition apparatus.